Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Tuesday Post

Gunmen from a radical Islamist group opened fire Tuesday night at a
beer parlour in northeast Nigeria, killing eight people including four
police officers as part of their ongoing sectarian battle against the
oil-rich nation's government, authorities said.

The shootings come
as the sect known as Boko Haram has promised to target Christians in
Nigeria's Muslim north, expanding its campaign of assassinations and
bombings. The sect is blamed by the government for killing at least 63
people in less than week, according to an Associated Press count, as it
continues its campaign to impose strict Islamic — or Shariah — law
across the multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Tuesday
night's attack occurred in the town of Potiskum in Yobe state. Local
police commissioner Tanko Lawan said the six gunmen began shooting as
patrons drank beer, which the local Shariah law technically opposes,
though bars remain open for those living there.

"We didn't confront the gunmen at the beer parlour," Lawan said. "Any police that goes there went on his own."

Boko
Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local
Hausa language, is blamed for at least 510 killings last year alone,
according to an AP count. In a recent attack, it killed 20 Christian
Igbo traders holding a meeting in Nigeria's northeast.

The group
also claimed credit for attacks that killed at least 42 people in
Christmas Day strikes that included the bombing of a Catholic church
near Abuja. The group also claimed an August suicide car bombing that
targeted the U.N. headquarters in the capital, killing 25 people and
wounding more than 100.

By turns defiant and threatening, President Bashar Assad vowed
Tuesday to use an "iron hand" to crush what he called the terrorists and
saboteurs behind Syria's 10-month-old uprising in which thousands of
people have been killed.

In his first speech since June, Assad
showed a steely confidence in the face of the uprising, one of the
bloodiest of the Arab Spring. But opponents called it a rambling address
by a leader who is dangerously out of touch.

Assad repeated his
past claims that a foreign conspiracy and terrorists are driving the
revolt, not peaceful protesters seeking to reform the country.

"We
will not be lenient with those who work with outsiders against the
country," Assad said in a nearly two-hour speech at Damascus University
in a conference hall packed with cheering supporters. He also issued a
veiled threat against those who have yet to choose sides.

"Those who stand in the middle are traitors," Assad said, flanked by Syrian flags. "There is no alternative."The
conflict in Syria is entering a new and heightened phase, with army
defectors and some members of the opposition increasingly turning their
weapons on government targets. The regime, in turn, has intensified an
already deadly military assault, and a U.N. official said Tuesday that
about 400 people have been killed in the last three weeks alone, on top
of an earlier U.N. estimate of more than 5,000 dead since March.

He also added the Death Star would be quite operational. Alright- he didn't, but it sounds like something he might say.

Greek disability groups are angry about a government decision to expand a list of state-recognised disabilities to include pedophiles,
exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. The National Confederation of
Disabled People (NCDP) calls the action "incomprehensible", and says
pedophiles are now awarded higher government disability pay than
diabetics needing insulin injections. The Labour Ministry said
categories added to the expanded list - that also includes pyromaniacs,
compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists - were included for
purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating
financial assistance.

There are liberals and predators quietly applauding this, I'm sure of it.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement apologized for calling a
15-year-old Parry Sound, Ont. boy a "jack ass" on Twitter after getting
into an online spat over a spelling mistake on the social media site.

Keith Pettinger, a student at Parry Sound High School, sent a message
to Clement on Saturday evening after he wrote, "Coach's Corner gave me a
lot to think about tonite."

Pettinger wrote: "@TonyclementCPC would you like to come to Parry
Sound High School on Monday with me and learn how to tonight properly?"

He later asked "if you can't spell how can you run Canada's treasury?"

In a private message sent on Sunday, Clement shot back at Pettinger's own apparent spelling mistakes before issuing the insult.

Pettinger offered an apology for calling Clement out, adding that he
just wanted someone involved with spending Canada's money to know how to
spell properly.

Pettinger later sent copies of the private conversation to the media, saying he found the message "uncalled for and rude."

I'm not going to excuse the actions of a grown man but I wouldn't let some pimply-faced kid take me to task on anything. Teen-agers ARE jack@$$es. Yes, yes, there are some nice kids (disclaimer) but, by and large, you have spoiled, uncontrollable little monsters who have the literacy skills of a turnip. Maybe THEY should apologise for their incessant rudeness, anti-social behaviour, making noise and getting up during a movie and their crappy choices in hairstyles, clothes and music. Then we turn our rage on the parents....

Hundreds of Muslims have protested outside a Buddhist school in
Bangkok, Thailand. The organization named Muslims for Peace is upset at
Wat Nonjok secondary school for its refusal to allow a Muslim student to
wear the hijab.

The Muslim organization claims that several teachers have refused to
teach the 18 year-old student or to allow her to enter the school
building, because of hijab.

Muslims for Peace have called on Thailand’s Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra to intervene.

It's not a white Western Christian organisation. It's an Asian Buddhist one. Yet, Islamists are involved. How can the apologist take a stand on this?

"Today, the federal government panel reviewing the proposed Northern
Gateway oil pipeline to the west coast begins its public hearings. Over
4,500 people — including many foreigners, and even minor children — have
registered to testify, just to gum up the procedure.

Sheila
Leggett, the clueless bureaucrat running the review, has lost control of
the process. Instead of weeding out irrelevant, repetitive and
non-Canadian witnesses, she unilaterally declared she'd add on an entire
extra year of hearings so that every single man, woman and elementary
school child in the world can use the review as some sort of political
soapbox. Canada's economic development and thousands of jobs will take a
back seat to Leggett's personal Oprah Winfrey Show.

Fortunately,
adult supervision has arrived in the form of Joe Oliver, the National
Resources minister. Yesterday he announced that if Leggett won't protect
the integrity of the review from foreign-funded environmental
extremists, he will.

"These groups threaten to hijack our
regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," Oliver
wrote in a public letter. "They seek to exploit any loophole they can
find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill
good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to
undermine Canada's national economic interest."

Unless anti-oil activists can produce an affordable, practical and relatively low-output form of energy, I suggest they learn how to deal with the vast amounts of oil we have (that the US, for some reason, doesn't want).

Only
a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people.
Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own
families — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly
differ on political, religious, social, and economic issues.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.

Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum
and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make
that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator....

Because leftism fills many of its adherents with contempt and hatred. It
takes a person of great character and self-control to continually
imbibe and mouth the mantras of the Left — that everyone on the right is
SIXHIRB: Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic,
Racist, and Bigoted — and not become a meaner human being. If I believed
just about everyone with left-wing views was despicable, I would be
meaner, too.

The JoongAng Daily said Kim Jong Un ordered “immediate executions when
people are caught trying to cross the borders.” There were also reports
that Kim gave the order to a special security squad of the Korean
People’s Army under his direct control, authorizing them to shoot
defectors on the spot.